July 9, 2011
July 8, 2011
Tar, Feather, Rail
The Atlanta cheating scandal is getting out of control. I hadn’t heard much about it until today, but reading this article has made my educator-blood absolutely boil. The worst part?
Phyllis Brown, a southwest Atlanta parent with two children in the district, said the latest revelations are “horrible.” It is the children, she said, who face embarrassment if they are promoted to a higher grade only to find they aren’t ready for the more challenging work.
Still, she doesn’t believe teachers should be punished.
“It’s the people over them, that threatened them, that should be punished,” she said. “The ones from the building downtown, they should lose their jobs, they should lose their pensions. They are the ones who started this…
…At Venetian Hills, a group of teachers and administrators who dubbed themselves “the chosen ones” convened to change answers in the afternoons or during makeup testing days, investigators found. Principal Clarietta Davis, a testing coordinator told investigators, wore gloves while erasing to avoid leaving fingerprints on answer sheets….At Gideons Elementary, teachers sneaked tests off campus and held a weekend “changing party” at a teacher’s home in Douglas County to fix answers.
Cheating was “an open secret” at the school, the report said. The testing coordinator handed out answer-key transparencies to place over answer sheets so the job would go faster.”
Every single teacher and administrator who knowingly took part in this debacle needs to lose their job, with the leaders losing pensions and spending some time in jail. You do not exonerate teachers who erased test answers, changed testing cards, or had knowledge that their peers were doing such because you want to send a very strong message that, in the future, you need to report this kind of behavior, not hide behind the hope that you’ll be held innocent if it ever comes out. Where’s the backbone? How do you expect to teach your students honor and discipline (as well as hard work) if you aren’t willing to exemplify it? Every one of the teachers who took part in this scandal needs to be perp-walked to court and every teacher that attempted to blow the whistle on them (and got threatened or shut down) needs to be elevated to positions of leadership. That’s the message that a fair and just society sends to the next generation.
July 6, 2011
It’s Starting
IBM Watson to replace salespeople and cold-calling telemarketers? This is in line with Matt’s conjecture that robots will take over most service jobs in the coming years. (What was it Matt, 20 years?)
Reboot
Juan Enriquez on the ultimate reboot. Starts with bad news, ends with good news. Great stuff.
Thiing-O-Matiiic!
Just put my $50 monthly payment into ING for my future 3d printer. I now have $501.62 in savings toward the little beastie. Slowly getting there!
*UPDATE* Found a good review of the Thing-O-Matic here. It’s a pretty clear run-down of the pros and cons of owning an early generation 3D printer, and a pretty clear explanation just why it is that I’m taking two years to save for one. Hopefully by the time I’m ready to hit the buy button they’ll have some of these issues (ReplicatorG to Skeinforge, competitive consumables aftermarket) worked out.
A Father’s Fiery Rage Against the Cold Machine
The family law system performed exactly as intended—and a despairing father set himself aflame.
Ironically, the Thomas Ball family is a triumph of the family-law paradigm. Within the context of that paradigm, everything in the Balls’ case went according to plan. The family’s fate is not a failure of state policy. It’s the best the state can do. That should impress upon us two things: the urgent wisdom of putting less faith in law and government, and the paramount need to cultivate—by other means—a motivating vision of marriage and family for our society.
July 5, 2011
July 4, 2011
Independence Day
In celebration of Independence Day, I decided to take my best hand-made pen and write out the Declaration of Independence. It was 90 minutes well spent and gave me a blister I’ll be proud of. This exercise taught me a few things, too: first, it’s been years since I wrote out anything longer than a return address in cursive, and my longhand has deteriorated to atrocious unreadability. Second, the Declaration contains some things that I never knew about the offenses that were imposed on the colonies (King George was a real jerk). And third, the 1337 words of the Declaration come from a time of beautiful prose, cogent thought, and clear intention that we don’t see often enough these days. Like Shakespeare, you have to hold a twisting, self-referential sentence wholly in mind until it winds its way to a beautifully florid conclusion. Clarity is there, but it’s all the more forceful when it finally emerges, fully realized like a gothic cathedral, from the mist of thought.
What gave me this idea? I’m glad you asked.
Happy Independence Day.
July 3, 2011
Quoth
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
John Adams
Quoth
“Everyone thinks himself the master pattern of human nature; and by this, as on a touchstone, he tests all others. Behavior that does not square with his is false and artificial. What brutish stupidity!”
Montaigne
